Nini's mom is out again, someone should really check on her
‧ FULL ARTICLE: 冰上的母女-虎嗅网
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It's a very long, weirdly written article, interviewing Nini (安香怡/An Xiangyi) and her mom 张爱君/Zhang Aijun, some excerpts I found horrifying, noted below:
- Six days a week, Nini was getting less than six hours of sleep a night.
>In her mother Zhang Aijun’s plan, Nini would get up at 5 a.m. six days a week, go to a gym near their home for physical conditioning, and then head to class at 8.
>Zhang said the goal was to help Nini build a stronger body and bring her physical conditioning closer to that of foreign athletes. “Maybe she just wants me to have a longer career in the future,” Nini said. The problem, however, was that for six days a week, Nini was getting less than six hours of sleep a night.
>So, there were small arguments. Nini tried to reason with her mother: training three times a week was enough “Mom, I’m not a foreigner.”
- Her mom runs their family like a company. And Nini got her ''salary'' from her mom since 4-year-old. But she would only get 10% from her performance/show income. Nini also needs to report what she spends if her expense is over $74.15 USD.
>For herself and her husband, 安龙鹤/An Longhe, Zhang Aijun used the phrase “the purest marital relationship in the world” to describe their marriage. “(Our day-to-day) communication is limited to sending each other delivery tracking numbers on WeChat.” Normally, Zhang lives at their home in central Beijing, while An lives near the Beijing Century Star Skating Club, 36 kilometers away, where he works as a figure skating coach. “We don’t even see each other. What a wonderful relationship he and I have,” Zhang said.
>Since she was four years old, Nini has received a monthly “salary” from Zhang, starting at 50 yuan, then 100 yuan, then 150 yuan, and eventually 10% of Nini’s earnings from performances. Now, any expense over 500 yuan (≈$74.15 USD) has to be reported to the company.
>“You can spend as much as you want, but it has to be reported to the company,” Zhang said.
>Nini: “My mom transfers money to me every month, but lately, it seems like she hasn’t been paying me my salary. I haven’t received any money.”
- They don't talk in person, only communicate through texts; if Nini wants to hang out, she would need to file an application to the ''company'' first.
>When Nini wants to go out for the day, she sends Zhang Aijun a WeChat message like this: “Mom, sorry to bother you. I’d like to request permission to go out with ___ on the ___ of this month and hang out for a bit.”
- 11yr Nini used to jump 3Lz/3F 300 times in 3hr. (Noted: high rank triples mean those which have higher bv, for example 3T/3S would be considered as lower rank jumps.)
>In a 2019 interview, 12-year-old Nini mentioned that, after landing more than 300 higher rank triples in just three hours, her fibula began protruding when she was 11, nearly causing her to miss the club’s figure skating finals.
>“I pushed through it that time, and unexpectedly, I ended up taking first place.” Later, the old injury to her fibula led to a sprained ankle ligament. “But I guess I was lucky. I was just one step away from a bone fracture.” As she talked about these injuries, her tone was almost that of an objective commentator, as if the things she was describing had happened to someone else.
- Nini's mom thinks despite Nini showed sign of resistance at 15 yr, deep down inside, Nini still love her very much. And the ''salary'' her mom brag about giving her since childhood, she would mostly give back to her father.
>From the time Nini was 15, Zhang Aijun had been “brainwashing” her with the idea that: “You’ve been through enough hardship. You can fall as far as you need to. Falling is a gift to you.”
>“Nini, look. I was hard on you. I would roar at you like a lion on the ice, but afterward, I always gave you freedom. Do you remember that I started paying you a salary when you were four? Fifty yuan a month, right? What other four-year-old was getting 50 yuan a month? And you had complete freedom over how to spend that 50 yuan.”
>Zhang brought up the changes Nini went through at the age of 15. There was a period when Nini would cry whenever skating was mentioned. Zhang said it was because “she loved me too much.”
>“But she kept declining, and she [cried because she felt that] she wasn’t bringing me glory.”
“She always wanted to give me the best. She saw me as a mother who demanded results.”Zhang said: “Nini absolutely agrees with me.”
>(Reporter: So, Nini, have there ever been times when you really wanted to skate well in order to make your mother happy?)
>“No. Most of the time, my mom is fairly calm. Occasionally, she has a bit of an emotional reaction, but she gets over it quickly.” When she skates, Nini said she thinks more about the fact that, since she has chosen to do it, she should do it as well as possible. When she was younger, if she didn’t skate well, she would get scolded. Of the 50 yuan her mother gave her each month, Nini would spend 10 yuan and save the remaining 40 in the “Dad” ATM.
- Nini's parents both think their daughter growing spurt has gotten out of control, and Nini's mom tried to gaslight herself from believing them making mistake with forming her daughter's training plan, by saying ''it's my first time to be a mom"; and as a result, Nini wouldn't want to share her wight with her father (her coach).
>“Why did I guide her toward becoming a figure skater in the first place? Because her legs were short,” Zhang Aijun said.
>An Longhe: “It was mainly because of her physical development. We just couldn’t seem to adjust the training properly... It ended up being somewhat different from what we had originally planned.”
>Zhang Aijun: “I had never raised a child before. I was a rookie.”
>There are many refrigerator magnets stuck to the family’s refrigerator. One features Nini during a competition; another shows Zhang Aijun at 28...Nini’s calligraphy teacher said that 28-year-old Zhang Aijun looked like Jarvis Cocker, the British singer who became hugely popular in the 1990s.
>Now, when Zhang looks at that refrigerator magnet, this is what she thinks:
“This is what I looked like when I was 28. You’re only 19. You’ll definitely lose the weight.”
>An Longhe and Zhang Aijun had assumed that, since neither of them was particularly tall, their daughter probably wouldn’t grow beyond 1.60 meters. But Nini has now grown to 1.68 meters, and naturally, her weight also turned out to be different from what they had expected.
>Nini has never told An Longhe her exact weight.